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Americai Speak
Americai Speak This is an adaptation of the preface to Ruby Olive Foulk's book, "Americai Speak." All first-person pronouns have been changed to refer to Miss Foulk, the author. Americai Speak is simplified English spelling and grammar for international, and for foreigners here and at home. The changes are of such a nature that English-speaking people can understand them when they are spoken, but they cannot read them until the changed letters have been studied. Every sound is always spelled by the same letter. Every letter has only one sound. The English letter "c" is not needed because it has the sound either of "k" or "s"; so Miss Foulk uses "c" for the short sound of "a," as in "hat." The English letter "q" is not needed because it has the same sound as "k"; so she uses "q" for the short sound of "u," as in "up." The English letter "x" is not needed because it has the same sound as "ks"; so she uses "x" for the short sound of "e," as in "let." Long "a," as in "hate," and long "i," as in "right," are compound sounds, and she spells them as such to save inventing new letters for them. She uses two different forms of "a." Capital, printed "A" is the sound of "a" in "all." Phonetic "a" (like the small alpha in the Greek alphabet) is the sound of "a" in "father" and of "o" in "not." Because there are twenty-eight sounds in "American Speech" and only twenty-six letters in English, she needed one more letter. She used "o" with a mark through it for the sound of "oo" in "book." This plan leaves "o" for the long sound of "o," as in "no," "u" for the sound of "u" in "rule," and "i" for the short sound of "i," as in "it." The plural of all nouns and pronouns is regular. The plural of "man" is "mans." In some cases she uses a verb form for both verb and noun, as the English word "love" is both a verb and a noun. "Speak" becomes a noun in place of "speech." The comparison of all adjectives and adverbs is regular, as "good, gooder, goodest." In English the most common ending used to form an adjective from a noun is the short sound of "i," as in "sun, sunny," "noise, noisy," "cloud, cloudy," "dust, dusty." She extended this rule to some other words: "Grammatical" becomes "grammari"; "American" becomes "Americai." All forms of all verbs are regular. The present tense of the verb "to be" is "I be, you be, he be, Is be, yous be, hes be." She dropped many Latin verb endings: "-at," "-ate," "-et," "-it," "-ant," "-ent," "-ance," "-ence," "-ion," "-tion," etc., for example: "Regulate" becomes "regul"; "Composition" becomes "compos." Under "Stems" she respelled and defined for identification all common English words that can be put into groups under the same root or stem. Other common English words were respelled and defined under their respective parts of speech. --from the Preface to "Americai Speak", found in Bruce Gilson's pages. category:Constructed_languages